The Love for a Brother
by angelwings02
Summary: Bianca's short life, and how Nico was the most important person in it.


Bianca di Angelo was constantly grumpy.

It was something that could almost be said to be a natural process. She would wake up in the morning in that same old boring dorm in Westover Hall, and she would wonder, why it had to be her who was stuck with this sad, sad life, where the teachers were a joke and the students even more so.

She would wonder why it had to be _here_, of all places, where the only colour in the whole castle was grey, and the scenery outside a variation thereof. She would sit in class and ask herself, what was the point of learning, since she could barely read, and could not seem to sit still. She wondered how military school was supposed to help with that, as the creepy vice-head, Dr Gottschalk, always liked to say. She wondered, when the occasion called for it, why the academy even bothered to try holding school dances—wasn't it obvious that the guys hated dancing, and that the girls probably weren't really stoked about it either? She would wonder why that creepy Gottschalk was always following her around school, she would wonder why her luck was so bad, so bad that people got bad luck just from being too near to her (it was true; the first person to say hello to her at Westover Hall broke her leg a month later, and her dorm mate constantly got into trouble).

And in the dead of the night, when everybody else but her was asleep, she would lie in bed and wonder where her father and mother were.

She would wonder, and she would get increasingly mad at the world, for giving her this piece of crap called life that she was supposed to treasure. She just didn't see the point in it at all. Life was never enjoyable, and it was never going to be. The grumpiness was like some sort of manifestation; it started small and insignificant, like a grain of sand at the bottom of her stomach, but then that grain of sand would magically turn into a piece of hot coal, and it would hurt her so badly, this confusion and miserableness, this feeling that something was missing, this feeling of being at a complete loss, that she would scream into her pillow and curse her parents for giving life to her, and curse God for even granting them the right to have her, since He probably knew that they never wanted her, or Nico.

Nico. He was the only thing in the whole entire universe that could make her smile. Nico was her life. No, he was more than that. Nico was the reason she even bothered living. He was the most important person in the whole wide world. She loved him, and she never bothered to hide it. She would sacrifice herself just for him: giving him her lunch when the bullies accidentally-on-purpose knocked his over, helping him with his chores so that he could finish them faster and go to bed, risking punishment by beating the crap out of the mean guys who liked to make fun of him. And it was all okay with her, just as long as she got to see him smile.

Nico was all she had, and she was all he had. They were close, and even though, being the adolescent boy that he was, he never admitted it, she knew that Nico loved her just as much as she loved him.

Nico kept her grounded. When the desperation got really bad, one thought about Nico and she would be able to pick herself up again. She would tell herself that Nico was younger, that he needed her to be strong, and she wasn't being strong by bawling her eyes out into a pillow. She would be able to stuff all those unwanted feelings back into the box and lock it tight. Nico kept her grounded. Nico kept her sane. Without him, there really wasn't any other reason to live.

Then she'd come to know of who they really were. Demigods. Sometimes just thinking of that term confused her, for it answered many questions, but created new ones as well. And in an act of total utter selfishness, she'd joined the Hunters. For the first time in her entire life, she felt like she belonged, like she was part of a big family. She never ever regretted that decision, though, she felt so free of all her burdens, and she thought that maybe things would go better from now on.

Being a Hunter was great. Apart from agility and immortality, she finally was able to say that she was something, and not just a delinquent girl with a cap over her eyes to cover her face. And as she pledged her loyalty to Artemis, she was able to make new friends, because they, like her, were all not ordinary one way or another, and they bonded over that fact. She was exposed to a whole new world outside of West-crummy-over Hall. It would probably be the only time in her life where she could declare that she had been happy. Nobody, not even her closest friends, knew that she had hardly thought of Nico ever since. She felt ashamed that she had almost completely forgotten about her little brother.

But she went on a quest to save her Lady, and it was fraught with dangers and uncertainty. They were crossing a huge junkyard, filled with weird old stuff that had probably been left out there for centuries. Somebody (was it Zoe or Thalia?) had said something about the junkyard, but she had not been paying attention; her eyes were glued onto a small action figurine. It was similar to the hundreds that Nico had owned, but she was, with absolute certainty, sure that he did not own the one that she saw in the junkyard. It seemed to be glowing enticingly, begging her to walk forward and take it home. Almost in a trance, she approached the figurine, and plucked it from the ground. And the earth started shaking.

She had triggered something, something being the huge Talos standing right in front of them, ready to take them down, no mercy coming from his cold, metallic heart. She knew that she was the cause of all this, and she knew she had to stop it. And so she got into the metal beast and stopped it before it could kill any of her friends. It went down. Hard. It took her with it.

And in that few seconds where it seemed as if she was falling into a deep bottomless pit, she panicked. She was going to die.

She was going to die!

But something called from inside of her. A soft glow. That's right, Nico.

Nico, what was he going to do without her? A tear rolled down her cheek. She had abandoned him again. And this time it was for eternity.

She didn't think about her fellow huntresses, or Zoe, or even Lady Artemis.

The last person that Bianca di Angelo thought of was her little brother.


End file.
